Leadership Behaviours That Can Help to Improve Wellbeing For The Whole Team

Leadership Behaviours That Can Help to Improve Wellbeing For The Whole Team

Is improving the wellbeing of your team an important aspect in the workplace? Leaders that choose to look after their staff are more likely to enjoy better relationships with them, and as a result the overall team are likely to perform better. This is something that leaders should consider putting extra effort into, so let’s look at some key behaviours that leaders can implement to improve overall wellbeing.

  1. Aim to reduce uncertainty

The thought of being uncertain can come across extremely stressful for humans and yet we find in the working world, it can be filled with uncertainty. These can be role-related, involve relationship breakdowns or even relate to general industry news. Because of these factors, leaders should try to support their workers in any way possible and introduce methods for increasing certainty.

There are many ways this can be achieved. Introducing flexible working and being clear on the boundaries can help to improve work-life balance and productivity. Allowing job crafting is also another way to improve this. This means the individual can cater their role to their personality traits and interests. The most important factor about reducing uncertainty, however, is being honest. This can increase trust and allow members of staff understand where they stand.

  1. Help staff with preserving energy

Having a sustainable approach to energy management can help employees to maintain an improved work-life balance and better relationships outside of work. It can also prevent exhaustion in the workplace, decreasing the chances of burnout and lower productivity levels. Ways to improve energy usage requires a number of skills, such as understanding when to break down big tasks into smaller ones, enduring more physical exercise and when to take effective breaks throughout the day.

Leaders can also help with this: it’s important to educate staff on what exactly energy management is, rather than getting them to focus on time management. This is because it’s not sustainable as more hours can’t be generated in the day. Other methods can include encouraging flexible working as people are different with their sleep patterns and how they use their energy. They can also be taught when to how large goals can be broken down into smaller tasks to achieve goals. This helps to prevent workers becoming incertain over their performance.

  1. Be constructive with your feedback and praise 

It’s been recognisable in organisations that it’s important to recognise employee’s skill set and develop them through positive reinforcement. By adopting a strength’s based approach to development, it helps to drive individuals to become more productive and produce a healthier self-image. Research has previously been conducted by academics Emily Heaphy and Marcial Losada who examined business leadership teams and how they performed depending on their feedback. They found that teams averaging around 5.6 compliments received performed better than ones who averaged around 0.36-3 compliments.

The main lesson that leaders need to learn is by understanding your employees strengths, weaknesses and what they wish to achieve, it can help to develop them through positive reinforcement whilst also guiding their behaviour through constructive feedback.

  1. Reinforce the company messages that are relevant

It’s easy to get lost in the vast amounts of information in the workplace. It’s common to use emails as a means of communication to circulate to relevant teams, but these can become rather stressful for workers. More importantly however, it’s also understandable for individuals to miss out relevant company information due to burnout and fatigue from all the emails that they receive.

These emails for the majority of the time can be critical to employee wellbeing and performance. They can be emails related to seminars that can be attended or well being initiatives that can be beneficial for staff members. This is why leaders should process this information for employees and send regular reminders about deadlines or attendance to events. This will show that you genuinely care about their well-being and in turn this will increase trust between leaders and employees.

There are many articles out there that tend to go to extreme lengths regarding wellbeing and what you have to do for your staff. They make points such as making changes to your work environment by checking ventilation systems or having to introduce workplace schemes for staff. However, sometimes the effort from leaders is all that’s required and producing relevant behaviours can be the only thing that employees need to improve their wellbeing. 

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